#read

As to the war with Japan, the President had already received my memorandum in general as to the possibility of getting a substantial unconditional surrender from Japan which I had written before leaving Washington and which he had approved. ↗

— Henry L. Stimson

#approved #before #general #getting #had

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#business

I like the sound of words, but I don't ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read. ↗

— Gregory Maguire

#reading #understanding #wicked #words #change

I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#movies

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it. ↗

— Roger Ebert

#bookstores #history #literature #philosophy #reading

If I’m going to write a book every American will want to read, it’s got to have lots of pictures. Those pictures must also move, and all the words in the book must be spoken and available audibly for all the readers to hear as they watch.

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— Jarod Kintz

#books #movie #movies #pictures #readers

I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist. ↗

— John Fowles

#movies #reading #movies

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#reading #music

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart. ↗

— Gilbert Highet

#reading #music

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.) ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#criticism #literature #reading #art